Merciful Judgments and Contemporary Society: Legal Problems, Legal Possibilities explores the tension between law's need for and dependence on merciful judgments and suspicions that regularly accompany them. Rather than focusing primarily on definitional questions or the longstanding debate about the moral worth and importance of mercy, this book focuses on mercy as a part of, and problem for, law. This book is a product of the University of Alabama School of Law symposia series on 'Law, Knowledge and Imagination'. It explores the ways law is known and imagined in a diverse array of disciplines, including political science, history, cultural studies, philosophy and science. In addition, books produced through the Alabama symposia explore various conjunctions of law, knowledge and imagination as they play out in debates about theory and policy and speak to venerable questions as well as contemporary issues.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is author or editor of more than seventy books, including The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States; The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture; When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives; Law, Violence and the Possibility of Justice; Pain, Death, and the Law; Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution; When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice and the two-volume Capital Punishment. Sarat is editor of the journals Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. He is currently writing a book entitled Hollywood's Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination. His book, When Government Breaks the Law: Prosecuting the Bush Administration, was recognized as one of the best books of 2010 by the Huffington Post. In May 2008, Providence College awarded Sarat with an honorary degree in recognition of his pioneering work in the development of legal study in the liberal arts and his distinguished scholarship on capital punishment in the United States.